Supposedly, if you put live frogs in a kettle of cold water on the stove, then raise the temperature very slowly, the frogs will eventually boil to death without trying to escape. I don’t know if that is true, but it does seem the perfect, if sometimes overused, analogy for what we see going on around us in America.

Interview by Andrew P of EnergyGrid, based in the UK. You have probably read one of Bageant’s articles, but who exactly is Joe Bageant? We interview him on his life, his work and his newly found internet cult status.

It is 7 am, already hot as hell and another code red day. I am cresting Mount Weather on Route 7 Virginia and into the face of a blood red sun behind a pink sticky haze that makes commuting so ghostlike here during the dog days of August. The code red is an atmospheric pollution rating, not a Homeland Security alert. It means the air is not safe to breathe unless you have to.

I know it makes me a dinosaur, but I still think there is much to be learned in America’s small neighborhood taverns. I call it my “learning through drinking” program. Here are some things I have learned at Burt’s Westside Tavern: 1, Never shack up with a divorced woman who is two house payments behind and swears you are the best sex she ever had, and 2, Never eat cocktail weenies out of the urinal, no matter how big the bet gets.

In the late 1960s I used to sit in Lafayette Park across from the White House, have spring picnics on the benches there with hippie girlfriends, reading Rimbaud, while waiting for the Robert Rauschenberg exhibit to open at the Corcoran Museum down the street.

Since George Bush’s reelection, the Christian nutjobs have mounted an assault on my block. In the five years I’ve lived in this neighborhood I’ve never had so much as one Jehovah’s Witness knock at the door.